Doctor, Doctor…

…I’ve moved abroad in a pandemic just before Brexit and need to sort out various health-related matters. What are my chances?
[Doctor just starts laughing]

I may have mentioned once that I wasn’t going to write anything about the French health system, because it was going to be very dull. But now I’ve more-or-less got a hold on it and have pretty much sorted out all the admin related to it, it seems worth saying a bit about it. So, don’t say you weren’t warned if you fall asleep reading this one[1].

Right, the French health system. It’s big, complicated and quite different from the NHS in many ways. Certainly, if you’ve grown up in Britain, it feels as if it involves a lot more effort at your end. But, let’s start with the basics: the French system is insurance-based. Everyone pays social security contributions out of their salary, in the same way as people pay NI in the UK. But, unlike in the UK, this doesn’t entitle you to free care in the state system. What it does entitle you to is the basic state insurance scheme, which will cover something like two-thirds of most of your health expenses. This sounds OK, until you look at the actual costs of things and realise that paying one third of the costs for every trip to the GP, hospital and so on, can leave you quite out-of-pocket quite quickly. Actually, you may be paying a bit more than one-third, because what the state scheme actually covers is two-thirds of the state rate for healthcare expenses. Healthcare providers, however, are allowed to set their own rates for care, which may well exceed the state rates[2], so you can be left with quite a shortfall if you’re relying purely on the basic insurance.

To avoid falling into this potential hole, you can buy additional healthcare insurance – this may well be provided by your employer, or you can look on the private market – that will cover some of the shortfall some of the time. Depending on what additional insurance you opt for, you may well be covered for expenses over 100% of the state rate on some things[3]; obviously, the more your additional insurance covers, the more expensive it’ll be. Suffice to say that you’ll be able to find something that suits your needs, though it won’t necessarily be all that cheap – you could well be spending 50-100 euros a month.

So, you’ve got your insurance. Now you have to claim on this if you actually need to go to the doctor or anything. This used to be done by filling in lots of forms; nowadays, you get what’s called a carte vitale, which is just a smartcard that has all the relevant information stored on it. You just hand it over when you need to pay for anything, it gets scanned, and everything sorts itself out. Once you’ve got one. As an expat, though, this takes B L O O D Y A G E S. So I’ve spent a lot of time messing around with forms, both to claim back health expenses and to avoid having to fill in more forms in the future. First of all, you have to go and get signed up with your basic state insurance – your employer doesn’t do it for you, unlike in the UK – which involves making an appointment. Three weeks or so after that, you’ll hear from the social-security people. Then you have to send them stuff[4] and, a few weeks/months/years later, you’ll be signed up with a social-security number and get the paperwork through to apply for your carte vitale. Which obviously then takes a while to process. So, with a bit of luck, I might just get one before my initial contract runs out. Say what you want about the NHS: the fact that the only real criterion for treatment is to reside in the UK and that you can just turn up and get free care at any doctor or hospital is great.

Anyway, you’ve done all the set-up: now you have to go and get some treatment for your whatever’s-wrong-with-you[5]. The first thing to say is that there are loads of doctors in France. Within 200 m of my front door, there are about ten registered. The difference with the UK is that they often only work in individual or small-group practices, rather than big surgeries, so it’s a less-centralised model. What this also means is that a French doctor is unlikely to offer the range of services you get at most GPs in the UK: for most routine medical interventions – blood tests say – you have to go to a medical laboratory with a prescription from your GP, who will then get sent the results and call you back. This means that medical matters can be a lot more drawn out than in the UK, where everything is often done on-site in one appointment, though you don’t need an appointment to head to the lab in France, at least. But it still involves having to go somewhere else and therefore takes a while, even if there isn’t a queue or anything. Because these labs are also where you go to have covid tests, so they’re pretty popular right now, as I found out when I went for my blood test as part of my initial general check-up. Similarly, you’ll have to go to a separate pharmacy to pick up any medicine. It’s also worth noting that pharmacies are the only place you can buy drugs of any kind in France, which is really annoying if all you want is generic paracetamol or ibuprofen or similar, because the pharmacy will only sell you expensive branded versions[6].

This general disconnectedness becomes a bit more of a problem in, say, a hospital, because what your doctor will do if you need to be seen by another service, is write you a prescription that you then have to take to the relevant place and organise the appointment for yourself. So, if you need an MRI or similar, you have to get in contact with the radiology department yourself. It’s just a bit messy and means you, the patient, have to do a lot more work, though you do get more control over who you see when. And also ends up with you storing things such as a tetanus booster shot in your fridge. Because your GP doesn’t have it on hand (obviously), so it’s to the pharmacy with a prescription and you keeping hold of it until your next appointment. I suppose I get more control, again, over my medication, but I can’t see that letting private individuals keep real medical-grade stuff at home for extended periods working out well in the grand scheme of things. Kids, pets, idiocy, are all real hazards that you’re unnecessarily amplifying this way….

Another relevant point is which doctor do you choose? You can find all kinds, but you’re usually going to want to go to a médecin généraliste first – in other words, a GP – because what you have to do in France is declare a médecin traitant. This is effectively ‘your’ doctor that is responsible for looking after you and is your first point of call. The reason this is important is because, if you need more specialist care, your médecin traitant is the one that’s supposed to refer you. You can not do this, but then your insurance won’t cover as much of the costs[7]. You can declare specialist doctors as your médecin traitant if you wish, but, obviously, picking a GP is a pretty good bet unless you’re certain you’re only going to need one kind of doctor. There’s also more GPs, so you can probably find one pretty much on your doorstep – mine is 120 m away. Though you can pick one anywhere in the country, if, for some reason, you want to travel for your appointments[8].

Anyway, you’ve got all your insurance set up, you’ve chosen a doctor, you’ve had an appointment and you’ve picked up your medicine. Wasn’t too hard, was it? Well, not by comparison with, say, walking up Mont Blanc in a kangaroo onesie whilst continuously playing the Marseillaise on the bagpipes. In the fog. Backwards.

Now, to finish, you might be thinking that an obvious flaw with the system is: what happens if you’ve got some sort of pre-existing chronic condition that means you need a regular, possibly quite expensive, prescription? Surely no private insurer is going to cover that, leaving you with just the basic state rate and hundreds of euros out of pocket every month? Well, fortunately, this is the Socialist Workers’ Paradise of the French Republic, not the US, so the government has actually thought about this. If you have one of the government-approved chronic conditions[9], the state scheme will cover 100% of your healthcare expenses for appointments, drugs, etc. related to that condition. And the private insurers aren’t allowed to discriminate against you anyway. And you will still want the additional private insurance, because the government won’t foot the bill for your other medical expenses – say, if you’ve got cancer, you fall down the steps and break your leg because you’re a clumsy bugger, you’ll be back on the usual government rate for treatment for the leg.

And, finally finally, the other problem is, of course, cost. Much like the NHS and basically every Western state healthcare/social-security system, the French system is a black hole of money. The population’s ageing, so health costs are going up, but at the same time the working-age proportion of the population is shrinking, so tax receipts and therefore funding is going down. Though the French are doing marginally better on this demographic decline than much of Europe. So, much as in the UK, it’s likely to get less generous at some point….

[1] This is how you manage expectations.

[2] Whether this is the case is something you know in advance. Healthcare providers in France can be ‘Secteur 1’, which means they will only charge the state rates at most for anything, or ‘Secteur 2’, which means they’ll charge more, and this is advertised on ameli.fr, the French national website for searching for healthcare providers and all things healthcare. You can pretty much assimilate this difference to the NHS/private-sector healthcare divide in the UK. A Secteur 2 doctor will cost you (or your insurance) more, but you’ll probably get seen quicker than if you stay in Secteur 1.

[3] This is particularly useful if you plan on going to dentists or ophthalmologists (unlike in the UK, opticians in France are purely people who sell glasses; you have to go to an actual ophthalmological doctor to get your eyes tested) – the French government, a few years back, had to mandate maximum rates for these sectors, because no one was going to have their eyes or teeth checked, because the practitioners were charging stupid rates.

[4] I ended up spending 100 quid on sending my birth certificate back to the UK to get an apostille – a fancy stamp – put on it to prove it was real, and on getting it officially translated into French, a job I could have done in five minutes. Which took two weeks on its own; if someone had told me I’d need to do this at the start, rather than only once I was trying to get on social security, I could have saved a lot of time.

[5] I fully realise that phrasing it like that makes it sound as if it’s a euphemism for some sort of STI or other delicate condition.

[6] What you do get in the supermarkets is all sorts of what the French call médecine doux, which is what we’d call complementary therapies or, if you’re feeling uncharitable, ineffective quackery. The French love all this stuff – phytotherapy, homeopathy, osteopathy, acupuncture – to the extent that I was recommended an osteopathy session by my health insurer. Now, some of it has some effect, but some of it doesn’t and, given the choice, I’d rather stick with actual drugs, please.

[7] This is what’s called the parcours de soins coordonnés in France. You’re ill, you go to your declared médecin traitant, who refers you up the chain as required. You’re happy, your insurance is happy and everyone wins. It might just take a while.

[8] Or, I suppose, if you’ve got something very niche wrong with you that only one doctor knows about. Unfortunately for you, he lives on a barren windswept rock off the Atlantic coast only reachable by ferry every third day if it’s not a weekend, public holiday, wet, windy, foggy, and the ferryman’s remembered/bothered to turn up. Because your doctor is actually…A MAD SCIENTIST!!!! This footnote brought to you by the Dali Foundation for Surrealism and Giving Harmonica Lessons To Giraffes.

[9] This is in no way a restrictive list, don’t worry.

Which Type of Mask Wearer Are You?

It’s not often I write clickbait listicles, but this is definitely the best format for this. Also, you don’t think I spend hours on writing these, right? Anyway, for your amusement, a typology of observed mask wearers:

Legal Maskists
Will wear masks exactly when and where as specified by the government, council, establishment or any other relevant authority; no more and no less. Very rare, in practice, because no one can keep up with the welter of regulations sufficiently to get it right all the time.

Maximaskalists
Will wear masks all the time in any situation that involves them leaving the house. May even wear masks in the house to be on the safe side. If they have a pet or a baby, it will also have a mask. You never know when the virus might creep up on you after all….

Anti-maskers
Will never wear a mask even in a hospital ward, because it’s a free country, right? Will also loudly protest at all possible opportunities about masks and whatever snowflake-nanny-state-liberal conspiracy is the goût de jour. Including the use of such poncy foreign phrases as goût de jour when there are perfectly good English ones available.

Maskerades
These people try to wear masks, but just can’t get it right for some reason. They’ve left their nose uncovered, or are using the mask as a fancy chin strap, or have accidentally somehow garroted themselves with it. Unfortunately, the virus doesn’t give you marks for trying[1].

Masking Type
They already had a supply of professional masks because they actually need one for work as a builder or doctor or whatever. They know how to wear one and they know it. They can pull it off unlike you. They’re cool now. You’re not. With your homemade bit of fabric ripped off an old sweater. Meet our new social overlords.

[1] Literally everyone in France is in this category.

Vive La France!

Having been here for a few months now, France is a strange place in many ways. At least to someone who’s more used to the British mentality. They have too many greetings: what do you mean, I have to say ‘Au revoir’ AND ‘Bonne journée’ to anyone I interact with even cursorily? What is this polite madness? They also actually seem to care about looking after the environment – organic food and general environmental stuff is a lot more visible – which is again clearly a sign of insanity. Looking after the planet? Whatever next?! Not having an idiot in charge[1]?

Though, seriously, the French are so much more statist than the British. You have to get a medical certificate saying you won’t drop dead from mild exertion just to join a badminton club. Technically, this is some sort of recondite health-insurance thing to prove that, if you do hurt yourself, it is genuinely an accident, but to my British mind, it just feels as if it’s an unwarranted intrusion into my personal choice. I’ve been playing badminton for a decade. I think I know the risks involved. Why do I need to go to the hassle of making a doctor’s appointment to fill in a bit of paper saying something that I know perfectly well to be true? Besides, how is anyone in any way liable if I hurt myself while playing? It’s sport: sometimes shit happens and it’s not anyone’s fault. My point is: it seems like a completely unnecessary bureaucratic hurdle that exists for no good reason, provided everyone takes the smallest modicum of personal responsibility to not perform a physical activity they know they can’t handle. But that would be counter to corporate solidarity, so filling in pointless forms it is.

But the thing I find really odd about France is how much more overtly patriotic the French are. At least on an official level[2]. If you watch any televised address given by the President, it’ll finish with ‘Vive la République. Vive la France.’ This is delivered unironically with a completely straight face. Official correspondence usually bangs on about things like ‘republican values’, ‘solidarity’ and ‘being a good citizen’. I suppose the British equivalent would be something like the PM finishing off all speeches with ‘God Save the Queen.’ and letters from HMRC exhorting you to pay tax because of your sense of civic duty. I’m sure there are people who do finish off every oration with ‘God Save the Queen’: they’re called the hereditary peerage. And an appeal to civic duty is unlikely to get very far in the UK if it’s not backed up with a big stick[3]. Let’s put it this way: if the PM did finish all their speeches like that, as a British person, you’d probably feel somewhat embarrassed and cynical about such an overt display of populist conservative nationalism. In France, though, the same behaviour isn’t perceived in the same way. As in, personally, I really can’t imagine me ever saying anything about the British state that unashamedly positive and being able to not laugh. Not because I’m some sort of rabid anti-monarchist; just, like, it’s the British state. I mean, come on. It would be like being proud of your car. Which is an X-reg Vauxhall Corsa with dented bodywork, mismatched wheels and panels, dodgy steering, and only able to get up hills in first with a tailwind. It never quite fails the MOT, but only because the mechanic is so amazed that it even starts, he forgets to fail it. You’d have to be mad.

Fundamentally, we’re talking about two countries with two very different cultural appreciations of the state, which is why going from one to the other seems so odd. In France, allegiance to the state and, crucially, the set of values and ideals that state is supposed to embody, is a key part of being (mainstream) French. You are republican. You are pro-liberté-égalité-fraternité. And so on[4]. Or, to put it another way, there exists a clearly articulated set of French values that you’re supposed to subscribe to as a French citizen and the state, as the ultimate guarantor and defender of said values, is therefore worthy of your loyalty.

In the UK, despite a lot of noise over the last few decades about defining British values and making them a key metric of whether immigrants have integrated and so on, we’ve never really got anywhere. If you got a random selection of n adults resident in Britain and asked them what British values were, you’d probably get 2n different sets of answers. Because people would change their minds halfway through. I certainly don’t have any sense of, as part of being a British citizen, subscribing to any defined set of national values[5]. What does exist, I think, is a set of overlapping Britishnesses, but I don’t think there’s any one thing that’s core to all of them[6]. So the UK state is more just a sort of administrative annoyance that you reluctantly have to deal with if you ever want to get anything done, rather than something you particularly look up to.

This divide is also clearly a product of historical factors: the French Fifth Republic is very much a modern creation on rational principles and based on working out what went wrong with the first four republics, plus a healthy dash of Bonapartist administrative thinking. It’s got a written constitution and everything, all clearly laid out. The British state just sort of happened. Let’s say there’s a lot of dead wood in that attic that no one’s ever properly cleared out. So it itself is a confusing mess that no one really understands.

Which is why, I think, the French can overtly say things like ‘Vive la France!’ without getting laughed at. And why the British don’t.

[1] You may or may not like Emmanuel Macron, but he’s definitely a long way higher up the ‘Sensible Politician’ chart than BoJo or Trump.

[2] Having been stuck indoors and working in a fairly international environment, it’s been a bit hard for me to judge how far this extends to the average French person in the street.

[3] I’m not saying the French don’t back up their appeals to republican virtue with big sticks, just that it’s usually the rhetoric first, and then the stick. In the UK, it’s usually ‘Do this thing because it’s the law and we’ll fine you lots if you don’t. Also, we might spend the money on something useful.’, so the positions of the two factors are reversed.

[4] Obviously, there are alternative definitions of Frenchness – for example, there are still diehard monarchists who would define being French as including support for the Bourbons. Or the Orléans. Or the Bonapartes. The French monarchists aren’t terribly united.

[5] Let’s put it this way: my list of British values would include being able to quote offhand both Monty Python and Blackadder, because obviously; liking cricket and other obviously silly and pointless things precisely because they’re silly and pointless; impassivity and understatement in the face of literally any event; being secretly convinced that any weather apart from drizzle is just cheating; appreciating what a good pie and a good curry really are; and general cynicism. Other people would probably disagree with at least all of those.

[6] Apart from mild xenophobia, especially with reference to the French, the Germans, the Italians, the Spanish and whichever you’re not out of the English (Northern), English (Southern), English (yokel), Scottish (Lowlanders), Scottish (Highlanders), Scottish (Islanders), Irish, Welsh (basically English), Welsh (moderates), Welsh (so hardcore they don’t speak English), Cornish, Manx, Northern Irish (Protestant branch), Northern Irish (Catholic branch), Jersey Islanders, Guernsey Islanders, Alderney Islanders, Sark feudal peasants, and whatever-you-call-people-from-the-Isle-of-Wight.

What I Did On My Weekends

In my spare time, I’ve evidently gone to visit the sights of Grenoble over the several weeks I had before lockdown. And by ‘sights’, I of course mean ‘museums and historical monuments’, because those are clearly the only worthwhile things[1]. So I thought I’d give a quick rundown of the ones I’ve got to so far, now that I’m not going to be able to visit any of the others for some further undefined period. With pictures!

The first thing I went to was the Bastille[2], which is the fort perched on the southern slopes of the Chartreuse massif[3], on the north bank of the Isère, overlooking the town centre. On my way there, I also happened to pass the old hotel, which was the site of the Day of the Tiles, for all you French Revolution fans out there[4]. To get to the Bastille, you have to climb about 250 m along one of several routes leading up the hillside from the riverbank. They’re all quite steep and windy. And infested by joggers. Well, on a Sunday morning at least. You can also get the cable car from the town centre if you really can’t be bothered to walk. You can even drive, if you like a road with a lot of switchbacks and exciting gradients. Anyway, I got up there fairly quickly, and was consequently rather hot, sweaty and out-of-breath – one thing you don’t get much of in Cambridge is walking up hills[5]. You do get some nice views from the top.

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Views! The red-roofed area is the original medieval town. Everything else is 20th century, pretty much. The middle image is looking northwestwards along the Isère flowing out of town; the other two are looking southwards over the city.

There’s also some interesting information about the city itself. Grenoble is very much a product of the 20th century – the city didn’t expand much beyond its medieval core till then. Then it caught Industrialisation, driven by hydropower in the mountains, and also became a tourism centre, as Alpine sports became a Thing. And then it got the 1968 Winter Olympics, which was the real shot in the arm that got the city going. Interesting fact: the 1968 Winter Olympics were the first Olympics of any kind to have a mascot. It was called Schuss and looked a bit like a Pokemon crossed with the Pixar lamp.

Schuss is the strange-looking thing in the middle of the picture.

The thing that really endeared the Bastille to me was that there was a monument to the geologists of the Alps there too. It’s nice to see earth science getting some recognition. It’s also the site of the Mountain Troops museum. I didn’t go in on this occasion, but I might visit it in the future. In terms of the history of the Bastille itself, though, it’s one of those cases of a fortified site being redeveloped several times in the last 500 years at great expense to keep up with advances in weaponry, and never actually being needed. No one ever bothered assaulting Grenoble from the 16th century onwards. So, it’s a bit of a white elephant, really. Though, of course, its deterrent effect might be why no one bothered assaulting the city.

Specifically, it’s a monument to these three old beardy white guys, but it’s also more generically a celebration of French alpine geology.

The second sight I saw was the St Laurent archaeological museum. It turns out this is quite small and very specific. I’d been expecting, not unreasonably, some sort of local archaeological museum, probably with some stone tools, some Roman pots, some medieval coins; you know, the sort of things you usually get in an archaeological museum. What it actually is is very specifically the archaeology of the site of the museum, which is the old church of St Lawrence. The clue’s in the name, really. So you get to wander round an excavated medieval church, with its Roman antecedent visible in the excavations, and there are displays of finds from the site. It’s quite pleasant, but it’s pretty quick – I was done in half an hour or so.

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Left: the church. Middle: St Lawrence about to be martyred by grilling. Right: church close up.

The third thing I visited was the Dauphinois museum[6] – the local area being the Dauphiné, this was essentially the Folk Museum. This is a rather bigger affair that packs a lot of stuff in over three floors and a basement in an old convent. Some of this is interesting, some less so. I enjoyed the exhibit on the organisation of the local alpine way of life, which is perhaps best summed up by a quote from the exhibit: ‘seven months of winter and five months of hell’. You spend seven months stuck in your cabin with your animals eating up all the stores, and then five months frantically rushing around to lay in enough stores for the next winter. What fun. The historical section on the building itself is also good – there’s a nice Baroque chapel – and the exhibition on the evolution of alpine refuges over the last couple of hundred years was surprisingly interesting. And had some good photographs. I was less taken with the bits on all the various kinds of hooch the locals had dreamed up over the centuries, and the section on the development of the ski industry in the area. Probably because I don’t drink much and have never been skiing.

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Clockwise, from top left: yes, that is an Alpenhorn. No, they don’t let you practise yodelling; Extreme irony – the first paragraph of the introduction to the exhibition says how great all these distilled spirits are, next to the official warning that drinking is bad for you; an imaginative rendering of a glacier; a very Baroque chapel; a rather precarious refuge.

Next on the list was the museum of the old bishopric, as it’s actually called; this is pretty much the town history museum. There are a load more Roman ruins in the basement – principally of the city wall and the late-Roman/early-medieval baptistery this time – and a chronological exhibition of the history of the area from the Palaeolithic through to modern times, including some of the cathedral treasury. There was also some sort of modern alpine calligraphy exhibition on the top floor that I didn’t get time to go round, but didn’t strike me as all that interesting. The actual history bit was quite interesting though – I finally found out why the region was called the Dauphiné[7] and got a better general sense of how the city had evolved over time. Definitely worth a visit.

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Left to right and top to bottom from top left: Hector Berlioz, a local boy; Stendhal, another local boy; Champollion, the decipherer of hieroglyphics, who was close enough to being a local boy that the city’s claimed him; Francis I as drawn, it would seem, by Picasso…;…who was knighted by local boy Bayard, the Ace Rimmer of the early 16th century; a Frankish helmet, possibly that of King Chlodomer, who got killed in battle with the Burgundians nearby in the 6th century (it’s fancy enough and found on the site of the battle, so it might actually be a reasonable attribution); the skull of Alexander, the earliest (9000 BC) human remains known from the region; the baptistery.

Having done plenty of museums on holiday in Spain, I went for a walk on the next available weekend instead. And, as it turned out, the last weekend on which I’m allowed it for some time. The weather was good, so it seemed a sensible thing to do. I walked back up to the Bastille and then out the back, up to the Alpine Troops Memorial on top of Mont Jalla, which had some interesting information about French alpine troops[8], and then northeastwards along the lower slopes of the Chartreuse massif, looking back over Grenoble, doing a big loop that brought me back down to ground level in La Tronche, a northeastern suburb of Grenoble. It was quite a strenuous walk, because it was one of those ones where you seem to be climbing constantly and then you start descending constantly. There wasn’t a lot of flat at any point. So I pretty much spent all afternoon zigzagging up or down the mountainside. But I did get some nice views. Given the combination of oncoming winter and lockdown restrictions, this might be the only walk I get to do till spring….

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Left to right: Grenoble from the side of Mont Rachais; the Alpine Troops Memorial; I followed the blue line. I couldn’t be bothered to do the red one, as I felt a little bit under the weather.

[1] Of course, given how broad the definition of ‘history’ can be, you can pretty much call anything a ‘historical monument’ if you try hard enough. Personally, if it’s happened since about WWI, it’s current affairs, but I’m prepared to believe that other people may think differently.

[2] No, not that one. That one’s in Paris. ‘Bastille’ is just a French term for a fortification, really (cf. ‘bastion’ in English), so many places have a bastille.

[3] Yes, this is where they make Chartreuse the liquor. And also several other spirits. Alpine peoples seem to have really liked distilling things to get shitfaced on the results. For more on this, see the bit where I go to the Dauphinois museum.

[4] Yes, all three of you.

[5] The other problem was there were a lot of people on foot on the path, so my competitive walking instinct took over. Even if a lot of the other pedestrians were jogging. It turns out trying to walk faster than a jogger is jogging is quite tough, doubly so on a steep slope. Didn’t stop me trying though and I did comfortably out-walk one jogger. So I think I won. Was it worth it? No. Will it happen again? Yes.

[6] No, it was not primarily concerned with a version of potatoes.

[7] It was from the name of one of the Counts of Albon, who were the first dynasty of the ruling princes of the region then called the Viennois (Vienne being a nearby city that was the local centre at that point). He was called Guiges IV le Dauphin, for regions that are either obscure or unknown – the museum didn’t say which – and the epithet was then used by his descendants as a sort of family name and therefore became generalised to the territory over which they ruled. Presumably old Guiges got his epithet from being good at swimming or something, as we’re a decent way from anywhere you’d actually find dolphins.

[8] Pretty much, they’re the elite units of the French army and have been for 150 years. What this translates to is that they get given all the really shitty tasks that involve everyone dying a lot. Hence the memorial. Though they do hold the distinction of being just about the only bit of the French army that didn’t fall apart in 1940-1, so I suppose all that training is useful for something.

The Nature of Middle-earth

In very exciting news[1], the Tolkien estate is going to publish yet another tranche of unpublished notes by Tolkien that provide some more information on a random selection of esoteric topics. Pretty much, the new book, to be called The Nature of Middle-earth, is going to be the thirteenth volume of the recently deceased Christopher Tolkien’s monumental History of Middle-earth, even if it’s not technically going to be part of the series. The teaser announcements suggest we’re going to get some ramblings[2] on the geography of Gondor, Elvish immortality[3], and who exactly can grow beards in Middle-earth[4].

Now, all of this is, as you know if you’ve just read the last three footnotes, very recondite and somewhat trivial. Who cares? Indeed, there’s been at least one article published making this very point – do we need all this pointless information?

The answer is, of course, no. We don’t need it. We didn’t need volumes 1-12 of The History of Middle-earth. We didn’t need Unfinished Tales. Or The Silmarillion. Or even The Lord of the Rings. Or, when it comes down to it, any published work of fiction ever. War and Peace is not going to meet any of the basic necessities of life[5]. The collected works of Shakespeare are unlikely to save you in a life-threatening situation[6]. I’m being hyperbolic, but you get the idea – to ask the question of whether any literary work is needed is to fundamentally miss the point about the purpose of literature. People (mostly) read books because they enjoy them, not because they need to read them. Some people enjoy it so much, it might verge on becoming a need, but no one’s going to claim reading is necessary for human existence[7].

Now, what we are talking about here is a particularly pointless collection of information that is of interest only to a tiny minority of mega-nerds[8]. And that’s the whole point – it is utterly pointless. That’s why I love it. I have so many things in my head that are, by any sane measure, entirely useless, but it’s my head and if I want to fill it with inapplicable trivia about a fictional world, that’s my business. It’s a pretty harmless pursuit and I enjoy it.

The great thing about books is that, if you don’t want to read them, you don’t have to. But some people probably do want to. I think 50 Shades of Grey is pointless, but lots of people apparently disagree with me. And that’s fine – I won’t read it and it doesn’t matter. Those who want to read it can. As long as they don’t force me to read it and I don’t attack them for being idiots, everyone is happy.

So yeah, The Nature of Middle-earth is an entirely unnecessary collection of pointless information. But why judge it for that or its readers for wanting to read it? It just seems such an unnecessarily cheap potshot. Literary tastes are subjective, and if you don’t realise that, should you really be writing literature columns for a newspaper?

So next summer, look forward to a post on facial hair in Middle-earth and what it tells us[9]. 😉

[1] Well, exciting for me. Probably not for most of you.

[2] Let’s be honest: if Christopher didn’t already put them in The History of Middle-earth, it’s probably because they’re a bit of a mess or don’t actually say anything that interesting.

[3] God knows, we’ve already got plenty of information on those first two. One imagines we’ll get Tolkien changing his mind again on how Elvish reincarnation works.

[4] Elves are beardless. Except Círdan. This has never been explained. Hopefully it will be now. Otherwise, though, we know Hobbits didn’t grow facial hair (except some bumfluff in a few cases), Dwarves (even the women) did, and all the humans operated much like actual humans. So it’s really only the Círdan Anomaly that needs explaining.

[5] Though you could probably use the pages to provide a pretty good level of insulation to your cave. Or keep the book whole and use it to batter people to death.

[6] You could keep a fire going a while with them, I suppose.

[7] Apart from some fringe extreme bibliolatrous cult, which I imagine exists somewhere. Probably America. It usually is.

[8] If we’re honest, a lot of books really fall into that category. No one, except a small clique of academics, is ever going to read something like The History of Kyrgyzstan Vol. XX, 1830-1840, but, because that’s non-fiction, it’s spared this sort of opprobrium.

[9] The answer will be that Tolkien was far too invested in his creation and really needed to take a step back every so often.